Users of wireless mobile communication devices often find themselves in situations where they would like to communicate with other people in their immediate vicinity, but they are prevented from doing so by a language barrier. That is, the users do not speak or understand a language spoken by the people near them. This situation is common when people travel outside their native countries or sometimes even within their own countries.
Systems that translate text into other languages are known. For example, Google SMS (short message service) translation and currency conversion service translates text sent to a particular SMS address and returns translated text to the sender.
Some application programs designed for execution by smart phones also provide translation services. For example, the SMS Speaker Translating application for Android mobile telephones translates incoming SMS messages and, using a synthetic voice, speaks the translated messages. Lingtastic announced a service named mobile.lingtastic.com, which translates and delivers SMS messages to other users' devices. Kwintessential's SMS Translation Service also allows users to send SMS messages to other user and have the messages translated before display on the recipients' devices.
Google has demonstrated a conversation mode of Google Translate for Android mobile telephones. This product includes speech recognition, translation and speech synthesis. Inputs and outputs are handled by a single mobile device. However, spoken conversations suffer from privacy issues in public places and are difficult to conduct in noisy environments.
While some of these and other prior art systems translate text messages, the user of such a system must show translated text displayed (in the case of Google SMS translation service) on the user's device to a person with whom the user wishes to communicate or, if the other person has a mobile device, the user must know the other person's mobile device address or telephone number to take advantage of an SMS message translation and forwarding service, such as mobile.lingtastic.com. Most people are, however, reluctant to disclose their mobile devices' addresses or telephone numbers to complete strangers. Thus, prior art systems for translating text have limited utility.